20 January 2014

Well, this was the best first week of a transfer that I have ever had that wasn't a quadpanionship. We taught 20 lessons with members present, have five people progressing towards baptism, and found a ton of new investigators. We're trying to figure out how to raise the vision of the zone because it isn't high enough right now.

I think expectations play a huge role. On a daily basis, Elder Diaz and I expect to have fun. We expect to see miracles. We expect to teach a ton of lessons. We expect to meet people. And we do. It all works because we do everything we can to make it work. Life lesson learned.

Here's our new address: 950 W Obispo, Mesa AZ 85210. We moved. Again. But we didn't move where we thought they were going to move us. We moved into a members home. It is 4,200 square feet and about 1,700 of those are ours in a private apartment. It is two floor with a massive kitchen and living space. We love it. It's the nicest house in the mission and it houses the nicest members in the mission. Our first day, upon arriving, the woman said, "Elders! You're our sons now! There are fresh brownies for you on the table!" Ummm, ok, if you insist! 

Later on, the next day, we returned. "Elders! On the table is fresh homemade bread! Take as much as you'd like!"

If you insist!

Later on, "I just finished baking brownies! Come eat 'em!"

If you insist!

I guess it's time to gain the 35 pounds back that I have lost so far. Bring it on.

This past weekend Elder Diaz returned to the DMV to try to get his drivers license. The first time didn't work so well and ended with him failing the written test. He returned the second time full of confidence. And left with it all gone! hahahahahh I died.

I had a cool experience while I was sitting there, waiting for him . They kicked me out of the room since he had to be alone so I sat in the lobby and read the scriptures. A woman sat next to me. I looked up and said, "She isn't happy to be here, I'll let her sit in peace." The second I thought that, I thought about Mosiah 28:3, a scripture that I read every morning at 8:30. It says, 

Now they were desirous that salvation should be declared to every creature, for they could not bear that any human soul should perish ; yea, even the very thoughts that any soul should endure endless torment did cause them to quake and tremble . 

And I sat there and said, "I am not there yet if I am thinking this right now." I battled with myself for 1 minute trying to give myself a good excuse to not talk to her and I couldn't find one. Everyone there looked angry and I thought she would be too.

Well I turned to her and struck up a conversation about Elder Diaz failing the test and how I was pretty sure that he would fail it again. She laughed and said her son had failed it too. We talked about families. We talked about driving. We talked about how Elder Diaz was from Argentina and then tied it in to driving and then to missions. We talked about her Mormon friends and we talked about the Gilbert temple open house. 

In our five minutes together I was able to teach her a lesson about eternal families and temples. Elder Diaz walked out just then, having failed the test. Again.

The woman is going to take her whole family to the open house this week. Success.

Yesterday we went to eat with our recent convert and her husband who's getting baptized in three weeks.They're awesome. He's Colombian and invited us over for a Colombian dinner.

Oh. My. Goodness. It was amazing. I don't even know what I ate but whatever it was was delicious. We left very, very, very satisfied. And due to bad planning on our part, we left and drove to our second dinner. We are both very sure that God blessed us with more room in our stomachs because we were able to down two dinners and not die in the process. #miracles!

After that first dinner I asked if we could leave with a prayer. Right then the member that we brought with us who was baptized a few years ago chimed in and asked if he could share a scripture. He read in DC about shaking an angels hand. It had absolutely nothing to do with anything and Elder Diaz and I were dying. We're pretty sure he opened to a random page and read the first thing he saw. It was so absolutely random and unrelated that to this moment I think of it as one of the funniest moments of my life. And yet as he bore testimony it was very powerful. But still hilarious!

Two days ago a wonderful woman was baptized. We have been teaching her for almost two months and they've read the entire Gospel Principles book and are almost in 2nd Nephi. They are devouring it all. The baptismal service was the most stressful of my life.

And this is why:

Usually the ward is in charge of making the programs. Not in a spanish ward- we almost always do that. But this time we had to put it on the ward since we needed to go to the open house of the Gilbert temple. We decided to trust our ward and ask them to fill the font, set up the chairs, and make the programs. They readily accepted the challenge. We arrived at the building twenty minutes before the baptism to find that they had hand written the baptismal programs.

not ok. So we went to the computers to make a new one. It was 5:50, ten minutes before the scheduled start time. We had told all the members that the service would start at 5:45 so that no one would be late. It worked.

So 5:50, I finish the program and the computer crashes. NO! NO! So I remake it. It's 5:58 We run to the library to make copies. At 6:05 we finish. No worries, Spanish things always start late.

No, for some reason that decided to start the program without us and without programs. Ridiculous! That also meant that we never got pictures of the woman in the white baptismal clothing. We were FUMING. We both said a prayer to calm down and it worked.

The program runs smoothly up until the baptismal ordinance. When we had entered I had checked the water temp but not the level. They only had the cold water on so I fixed that but didn't look at the depth. The water was only a foot and a half deep. Not enough. But they tried anyway. It took five times to do it correctly. We were dying.

The program continues and ends with a hymn. Now, this is a Spanish ward, keep in mind. No one plays musical instruments so we didn't have a piano. Well for the closing hymn a 12 year old decided to be the accompanist. Bad idea. She played one hand and I still don't know the notes that she played since they were random. Everyone switched between singing the melody and watever the notes were that the pianist was playing.  I almost stood up after the first verse and stopped it. I should have. After the end of the second verse the pianist tried to do a cool ending. Nope, it sounded like the Mario theme song start. ASDLKFJAS:DKLFASK:DFJASKDFJAKSLDFJALKDJFAdf.

Life lesson learned.

But the spirit was definitely there at the baptism and we could feel it. It was relieving and peaceful despite the stress and anger that we felt.

The family of four that we are teaching are getting baptized this weekend! We love them so much. They are inviting EVERYONE to the serve. We're expecting every missionary in the zone to be there (26+), President and Sister Toone, the entire ward, and all of his and her colleagues and friends and their friends' neighbors. We're excited for the biggest turnout ever.

The Gilbert Temple open house was unreal. Check out the pictures: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151848833491906.1073741830.664426905&type=1&l=5be6cb3fbc

They started a tour every 60 seconds. The original plan was one every ten minutes. Nope, too busy. It turned into a silent tour since there were too many people. And the temple interior was loud! It was weird. 

That temple is AMAZING. It is HUGE inside. WOW. The celestial room has a chandelier that is 18 feet tall and 8 feet wide. The baptistry is unreal. There are deep deep brown woods. The tile is exactly the same as the tile piece that I have on my desk. Imported from Israel with hews of red, green, brown, silver, and gold. It is unreal.

There was a very special spirit inside. And the family that we took felt it as well. At various times in the tour, we heard them say, "This is where our daughters (5, 8) are going to get married." Later, "This is where we will get sealed."

Outside wasn't what I imagined. I was expecting a wile mob of people rushing in. it was very very organized and very well thought out.

We love that family. Tonight that invited us over to their home to have their first hosted FHE. We've had two with them in members' homes. We're stoked.

Yesterday we had the privilege of translating at the Mission President's Fireside. It was a fun experience and is getting way more fluid for me.

Last P-day I took the first nap I've taken in months. It was three hours long and was three hours of paradise. I felt so good when I woke up... Today for P-day we're playing bocci ball with the members that we live with. Victory, here I come!!

Thank you so much for the letters, Grandpa and Grandma and immediate family! It was great to hear from you!! 

I hope everyone has the best week ever!

Love,

eJ

10 June 2013

I got in a car crash this morning. Well, it wasn't really a car crash but this metal pole jumped out of NOWHERE and broke our right side rear view mirror. Ahhhh, my driving record isn't perfect anymoreeeeeeeeeeeee. We've already called it in and will be dropping it off later today to get fixed and whatnot. The ONE time I park next to the pole...the ONE TIME! I hit it backing up at 2mph, if that. 

Gah.

Before I forget, THIS WEEK IS THE LAST WEEK OF THE TRANSFER. I don't know where time has gone! So, if you're not planning on sending a letter by Wednesday to me, you should probably send it to the mission home (see side bar  on blog for address). I'm 98% sure we'll both stay in Chandler but you never know. Since we're both new here, since I'm training, and since we have so much work it's almost guaranteed we'll stay. I hope. 

This was an awesome week. We didn't find as many as we did last week but now we have 4 people with a baptismal date in June and they're all progressing. We're pretty excited. 

Speaking of baptismal dates, you'll never believe what happened. The person that was supposed to get baptized June 15th got anti'd....

....

But it didn't go bad! Our investigator actually anti'd the guy back! It was actually his old pastor from his old church and our investigator went off on him! The investigator was at church yesterday and we had him meet with our Bishop for a bit. 75 minutes later they came out of the room - both happy. This baptism will be the first baptism this ward has had for almost 10 months now and we will have found and baptized him in 3 weeks! He is crazy prepared and there have been some unbelievable miracles in his conversion story that I can't write here. Unbelievable. Almost. He also did the commitment from the sunday school lesson from last week to compile his four generation family history chart haha. 

We had a pretty cool experience with him this week. We planned to go over the 10 commandments with him but the spirit prompted us otherwise and we talked about the Book of Mormon for the whole time. He has struggled reading it since he has such a strong testimony of the Bible. The lesson changed things and he's doing really well now. At the end of the lesson he spent 15 minutes thanking us for being so supportive and loving and how he feels something different from us etc. It was pretty humbling to hear him testify about the role that we have been able to play in his recent life. 

The Mesa Mission President told some stories recently about how their missionaries were stalked. But by who? But members of the Cornerstone church. They have anti Mormon classes in their church, offered during services on Sundays, and they send people to follow LDS missionaries around and knock on the doors that the missionaries visit. We had the same guys in Queen Creek and looks like they're hitting the Phoenix area hard. They anti all the investigators they can find. Usually I wouldn't put the church name in the email but these guys take it too far.

The temple this week was awesome. I learned Elder Myler got red lighted from Tiwi (in-car GPS) hahahahaha

We met someone who had a "Chweenie dog" this week. What a terrible creation.

This last week we were visiting with some investigators from Dominican Republic, and Chile. They all said where they were from, Elder Diaz said Argentina, our member said Chile, and then it was my turn. Naturally I said Brazil but for some reason they didn't believe me.

I walked up stairs this last week for the first time in months! We never go up stairs because there's nothing upstairs of any building that we ever need...

So it's officially hot. 113-115 was the high this week and we were out on bikes. I think the most depressing thing is when we're biking home at 8:55pm and see one of the giant screens with the temperature and it says 107' F. Kills me.

I thought Arabs might have been onto something for the heat. Nope. Still hot.

Speaking of bikes and car crashed, I almost got hit again this week. We were biking up north to visit someone and this car was pulling out of a parking lot to turn onto the road. This person decided that she didn't need to stop for the stop sign and  plowed through. I swerved out of the way and my pedal just about his the front of the car. 

On Sunday yesterday I was getting ready to sit down when I was approached by one of the members. He asked me, "will you translate?" There are some English families that were present and the normal translator wasn't there. I said yes and got ready and was pretty nervous. Everything went perfect until the youth speakers got up. They spoke so fast and mumbled into the microphone. I looked at the Bishop on the stand and he looked at me and laughed. I just whispered, "sorry!" into the microphone and the people with the translators on just laughed. It was a pretty fun experience and I was a lot more attentive than usual. There were some awesome talks. My favorite was on an experience from girls camp where they blindfolded some of them and had them walk an obstacle course holding onto an "iron rod." There were people without blindfolds walking around trying to lead the people with blindfolds astray. One of the leaders (blindfolded) told of one girl who tried to "tempt" her by saying, "Help, I'm lost!" The leader then responded, "Come and walk with me, we will go together!" The youth 'tempter' then said, "aren't you a leader?? Help me, I need your help!" The leader told us that she couldn't tell if the girl actually needed help or not and was trying hard to decide whether or not to check (which would have disqualified her. She likened it to people who may have wandered who need help but aren't willing to come where the good is and she said we can't leave the path to help them but we can invite them and encourage them to come walk with us. It was a pretty touching story and excellently delivered. Our investigators loved it.

We are teaching a woman who is from (I'm going to butcher the spelling) Guahaka, Mexico. She speaks a very interesting dialect that has some similarities to spanish and sounds awesome. She also speaks some spanish.

We are taking a recent convert out with us to visit some people. He has been looking for a new house to move in with his young child and pregnant wife. We took him to visit the above-mentioned investigator who had just that day put her house up for rent and is the perfect price and location for our member. The blessings of missionary work!

I think I love spanish wards so much because the overwhelming majority are converts. It makes taking people out with us more personal for a lot of our investigators.

Right now we're teaching a young husband and wife who are expecting their first child. The father is drinking a lot and the wife broke down in tears telling us how she worried for him as a result. We had a member with us who was a convert and had been through the exact same thing  and he bore super bold testimony to the husband about how he needed to change now. It was pretty cool to see how bold we can be with the spirit and if it's loving. They didn't make it to church since someone stole the husband's identity in Mexico and was doing some money scam.  The family is going through a lot and there's a lot of stress in their relationship but they both said yesterday that they think this can save their relationship and their family. It's awesome to see people change, I'd say that's my favorite part.

We ran into an unbelievably drunk man yesterday. He was too drunk to even shake my hand and we told him that was the last drink he should ever have again in his life. I thought he was going to punch me, he looked so mad haha.

Remember the Jehovah's Witness I wrote about last week? Well we ran into her again. By ran into her I mean we knocked her trailer door. She answered and was surprised to see us. She had told me to research some anti thing she told us last week which I learned about (thanks Sister Hines!) and told her the real story. She told me she had more for me and would give it over next time we saw. Anyway, that wasn't the point of stopping by. I told her I had read her magazine and found it interesting and offered to give her one of ours again. She declined and said, "Jehovah already has spoken to me, I won't read it." I left it on her doorstep by her door with our phone number on the back. She gave me four more magazines and a book. She couldn't comprehend that I was genuinely interested in what she believed and that I like to understand the people I teach. Her question was, "if you believe you already have the truth, why are you reading this?" I told her that if we aren't willing to put our testimonies to the test then we don't trust God. Anyway, those little magazines did the same as the one last week  did - just strengthened my testimony of the restored gospel. It still blows my mind that they never talk about the role that God plays in their church today. Never. Not once. I think she thinks she's going to convert me. I have a lot of respect for their beliefs but not the way they go about sharing them. I think the religious zeal goes a bit too far. We talked to someone this week who said that some Jehovah's Witnesses that stopped by three years ago talked so strongly to her about how she's going to hell that she tried to kill herself. Too far.

It has been a good week and next weeks letter will have a baptismal picture attached!

Thanks Katie, Jamie, Sister Hines, and Eric for the letters this week! 

Hope you all have a great week!

Love,

Elder Johnson